Sacred places

St John’s (Southgate) prayer chapel offers a sacred place for people to rest, recover and reset each day.

This space is regularly used by people from our local business and residential communities, along with passing visitors who are curious about “what’s inside.”

The St Johns community is pleased that the chapel is used in such diverse ways. It reflects something of the complex, interconnected special or sacred stories of life that we share at Southbank.

Every human activity, encounter and experience happens somewhere. At a place. As those things happen, we are not always conscious of where they’re happening and how that place impacts what happens. It is often taken-for-granted.

We long, however, to return to those places where our experiences were good, where they positively added to the formation of our life and all that we hold precious. It’s not enough to only recall those experiences. Returning to where those special things happened brings those experiences into the present.

Places impact the formation of our identities and the relationships that are created and flourish there. As physical beings where we are matters. Places hold deep memories for us, both good and bad, and returning to those places revive those experiences even when the events are long passed. How many of us in our ethnically diverse city, for example, long for our place or origin, our homeland? Even when, in my case, that homeland might only be another Australian state. 

Familiar surroundings, sights, sounds and odors restore senses of wellbeing, order and completeness leading us to live and act naturally and with confidence. We know who we are and how to act in our familiar places, and we know those who are there with us on our common grounds.

God meets us in sacred places. The Franciscan Priest, Richard Rohr defines sacred space as a transformative “inbreaking of divine reality” that jolts us to be fully present with God into the “Total Now”. It is liminal space where control is relinquished, allowing alternative consciousness and divine encounter. Where this happens is a vital part of that encounter.

St Johns prayer chapel offers a familiar place for those who use it. Its familiarity is not because those who use it necessarily have previous associations with it. The opposite is probably truer. Instead, their religious faith experienced as God’s inbreaking, is where they return when they use our chapel. 

It’s a space made sacred by that shared presence and the relationships that follow. It’s a space where worldly noises are hushed, so that those who are there can be wrapped in God’s prayerful and sacred completeness.

The St John’s community is glad that it can freely offer its prayer chapel for public use. It’s a special, sacred place available to all.